Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (19 page)

Although Hudson had initially feared that she wouldn't be able to add much to this aspect of the fight, she eventually joined the legislative effort. “The bill from the beginning was bipartisan,”
she notes. “That was the strength of it. The sponsor in the Senate was a conservative Christian Republican, the sponsor in the House was a Democrat known for a long time as an environmentalist. That brought a coalition.”

The framing of the bill by its supporters was crucial. “We promoted it as a pro-business bill,” Coppock says. “Tourism is our biggest industry in Tennessee. Development is huge. Nobody wants a condo across from a mountaintop removal site. Pro-business legislators supported our bill.”

The group lobbied legislators every week of the legislative session and eventually made presentations before committees in the Senate and House. Although their support in the Senate Environment, Conservation, and Tourism committee was never in doubt—they had more than the five committee votes needed to get it to the Senate floor—the chairman, Senator Tommy Kilby (D), opposed the measure and persisted in delaying the vote.

Kilby's tactics shifted the focus to the House, where support for the bill in the eight-member Environment Subcommittee was much less assured. The vote occurred in April 2008 on the final day the subcommittee met.

“We had a nail-biter,” recalls Coppock. “We thought we had four yeses, one no, and one undecided. The undecided wasn't in the room when the vote occurred. He left. One of our yes votes switched and voted no. It was 3–5.”

It's clear from the looks on their faces that the narrow loss was a devastating blow. Coppock quickly asserts that they will fight for passage next year, but Hudson turns her clear, aquamarine eyes to the floor, blankly studying the carpet as she gathers her thoughts. “We had both said, ‘One year and we're out.' It's hard on the family, the pocketbook. We don't know how we're going to do it, but we know we have to.”

“How can you walk away from it?” Coppock interjects. “When God calls you to do something, you can't just say, ‘We're done now.' Or in the great Old Testament tradition, ‘I can't be a prophet, I have a speech impediment.'”
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Hudson continues: “We tried to find an environmental group to take it over, and they all looked horrified. We had to realize that nobody else could bring the coalition we had. We're halfway there now—all we have to do is to move two votes and hold the ground we've gained.”

The ground they've covered is considerable. Following the bill's failure, Democratic governor Phil Bredesen indicated that he would actively support the bill when it was reintroduced. Speaking in favor of the stream buffer zone provision in the legislation, Bredesen told the
Knoxville News Sentinel:
“For me, with all the energy I've put into trying to preserve lands for future generations in East Tennessee, to have them strip-mined is not consistent with that goal.”
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Hudson and Coppock are counting on such pledges to buttress them as they press toward the high mark during the next legislative session. Still, they dread the emotional maze that comes with the territory. They recall that some days their prayer was “Please don't let me cry in public.” At other times, they followed the lead of country music singer Kathy Mattea, who came to the Capitol to lobby alongside them and lend support. “She said that sometimes she just prays, ‘Dear God, you know I don't mean a word of this, but I need to pray for these guys, and I want to mean this.'
I want to mean it,”
says Hudson.

“It's been a real lesson in faith,” Coppock agrees, recalling a particularly trying moment immediately following a contentious hearing. Putting on their best game faces, and reminding themselves of their commitment to building bridges, they approached the members of the coal industry who were present. One of the recurring lines that the coal operators used in opposing the bill was that Hudson and Coppock relied on misleading facts and statistics.

“They were towering over us, but we were telling them that we were open to them telling us what we said that was wrong, what statistics we got wrong,” Coppock says. “They never corrected us on anything after that invitation. Coal operators have
the reputation of being bullies, and neither of us are physically intimidating, but they were backing up from us.”

Hudson and Coppock attribute their strength to LEAF's overall vision, that “light is the best disinfectant,” and to their commitment to approaching their opponents as human beings. Coppock continues, “When you're dealing with an industry that is so profoundly dysfunctional, the last thing they want is light.”

Both women credit their extended family at Church of the Savior with first setting an example for them. It's a lesson they are making sure to share with their children. Each is a devoted mother; Hudson has two daughters, Coppock one daughter and one son.

“My college-age daughter doesn't talk about how much money she wants to make so she can buy a Beamer,” Hudson says. “She talks about being socially responsible, doing for others. If it'd just been me pushing that on her, she might have turned away from it. But she was surrounded by others who believed that, who were examples of that.”

“It's the Christian spirit here,” Coppock seconds. “Live and let live.” She says that kind of acceptance is something that originates from behind the pulpit with Reverend Gill. “He created an environment that allowed us to follow our passions. It's safe to be who you are and to be different from each other. There is no polarizing and no factions. People disagree, but they sit down and talk things out. I don't see how LEAF could've been created in another environment.”

Pat Hudson talking…

I'm the eighth generation in East Tennessee. My father's side is Scotch-Irish, English, and we even have a Native American branch off of that side of the family. My mother's side, she was a Midwesterner. She was from Illinois, from German immigrants. More recently—not real recently—mid-nineteenth century.

My father's family was from Sequatchie Valley, which we visited
pretty much every month, and that was even more rural than where I grew up. It's a little bit west of Chattanooga, and there was really only one main road in. You had to go into Chattanooga, into Red Bank, and then up over what they called the W-Road to get into the valley. I was ill every time we did that as a child. The family had been in that place since about 1815, and so there you were connected not only just with nature but with history, just layer upon layer.

My grandfather had an eighth-grade education—that was pretty much all that was available down in the valley at that time—and so the family had to do just a little bit of everything. My uncle was a carpenter. They did stonework, they were janitors in the school; they just did everything. My grandmother had a greenhouse. Everybody in the family did something to add to the family. It's a pretty common Appalachian story.

There was mining down around Sequatchie Valley, and so certainly my dad's family was aware of it. But my uncle, my dad's older brother, went into the mine for one day and came back out and said, “I'm not ever going to do that.” And I think because my dad saw his big brother have that reaction, he never went into the mines. That's the closest our family ever came.

I grew up in what was countryside and is now practically wall-to-wall subdivisions in what's now the Karnes Community. The house that I grew up in, they built it when I was on the way and up to the age of two—my dad built it himself—and we lived there from the time I was two on, and that would've been 1958. It's about halfway between Oak Ridge and Knoxville.

My father didn't like living in town. He came down to Oak Ridge when it was new,
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moved us out about fifteen miles out of town into the countryside, and so my childhood was spent on around 200 acres surrounding my homeplace there. We didn't own all of it, but it was available; in those days, children just ran.

My father taught me very early on the tree names, how to make hickory whistles, how to make dogwood slingshots, all of that sort of stuff from the Depression-era child. You know, they'd
had to make do. I've tried, but haven't done a real good job of passing that along to the next generation. They know it—I've actually had him show them—but it's just not a part of their whole being the way it was for me. We don't let children run the way they used to.

It was a very personal connection to nature. You knew the tree names, you knew the cycle of the trees, you knew what was budding and what was blooming. And it's just been a part of everything that I've been from the beginning. There was no real disconnect; now I think kids have indoors and outdoors.

I can remember, at about the age of ten, standing up on the hill behind my parents' house, which had a panoramic view of this whole valley, and it was fall—which has always been one of my favorite times of year, that crisp feeling in the air—and just knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was connected to absolutely everything. I don't think I labeled it God, really, or I don't think I labeled it in a way that a church person would, but I sensed it, I felt it, and I still remember that day vividly.

My parents both came to Oak Ridge in the very early days and started going to church in the only church there was, which was the Army chapel. And after other churches began to develop, there were a core group of people who really liked that interdenominational way of going to church, so my parents kept us there.

I was a little bit unusual growing up in this area, because I didn't have a label, which was freeing, I think, in some ways but was very difficult for a child to explain because everybody—the majority of the kids I went to school with—were Baptists. That was the primary thing to be, and then if you weren't that, well then, at least you certainly were a Methodist. And if you weren't that, then, well, a Presbyterian, but if you got beyond that, then they didn't know how to take you.

Interestingly enough, it's very much like the United Church of Christ, the church I wound up in as an adult, with a lot of meandering in between. It's Christ-centered, but it's noncreedal, which means there was nothing you had to subscribe to or say
that “I am…I do believe in these ten tenets” or whatever. So probably the description of it that most people would understand is Congregational: each congregation is free to believe in the way that they feel called to believe. It's different from a lot of denominations, where there are certain specific things that you have to profess to be members.

Going to church as a child gave me a hatred of dressing up. The 1950s, early sixties were unkind to little girls going to church with those little crinolines, where you sat down and it was like sitting on barbwire. I'm being a little flip about that. But I think the church gave me a sense of grounding, a sense of rhythm to the week, which I still find really necessary. If I don't go to church on Sunday I feel like I'm not anchored for the week. It gave me an awareness—and I think I sensed this anyway—a way to frame the fact that there is something much larger than yourself and you have to be aware of that at all times and not be so totally self-centered and egocentric that you don't see that. I think that's real critical for children to realize.

Church also gave me some of the language that I've used to try to discern what's going on in my spiritual journey, but it also gave me language that I've had to run from as well. So there are things that you take away from that childhood experience, and then there are things that you, I would say, grow beyond. And maybe everybody wouldn't feel the need to do that, but everybody has to find their own language and their own way of expressing their spirituality. I've always liked that saying “There is no hand-me-down religion”—each of us has to forge it or form it in our own way.

So church was important, but at about fourteen, I went the other direction, like most teens do, and didn't want to have anything to do with it for a long time.

For a time, I was attending a very fundamentalist Missionary Baptist Church. I did that because the young man I was dating, and whom I actually ended up marrying, was the son of the pastor. He was my first husband. And that was an experience that
was very disillusioning. The language was all there, the use of the Christian terms was all there, but it was a pretty toxic experience, just because of the personalities involved. And it actually created problems for me using the language of the church, then, for a period of time afterwards. I'm sure a lot of folks have that experience. I then did not attend church for a period of five years.

I wandered back into a Unitarian Church because of the emphasis on social justice, found myself attending there for quite a long while. The way I've sort of described it to my children, because they've asked me this, the Unitarian Church is a wonderful church for a lot of people, it gives them exactly what they need. But for me, it was like running around on the outside of the circle. And I think of the center of the circle as being God, and there's all these different spokes, all these different paths, to get to the center. And for me, I felt like I needed to choose a path and go a little more toward the center of the circle. I think all of us have to find our own path.

You have to be suspicious about anybody who believes that they have all the truth. And so I want to be really clear: I'm not writing out a prescription for anybody else. But I have gotten to the point where I can talk about what works for me, and that's different from proselytizing and thinking everybody will find the same answers. I don't believe that at all. I think each person finds their own answers in their own way. And it may not look like my way, and that's wonderful, that's great—it's the way it ought to be. A few years ago I would've been hesitant to talk about it 'cause I would think people would think I was trying to preach to them—and I'm really not—but I think at some point you feel like you have struggled with the issues that everybody else struggles with, and this is what I've decided for me, and why not talk about it because you're just explaining yourself or trying to?

After the Unitarian episode—and getting very, very involved in social justice issues, which has been a mainstay, then, of religion, for me; I think they're just intertwined, I can't tweeze those apart anymore, those are all one and the same—the place that I
found my sense of spirituality was with the Society of Friends, the Quaker religion. To me, the language, the way that they describe religion, the way that they describe spirituality, just resonates with me in a way that no other terminology has.